Your website is your digital calling card
This is the digital age; we can buy our toilet paper on the internet, and most people are cancelling cable to watch more Netflix and YouTube. While it’s great to have a sleek business card to dish out at networking events and cocktail parties, that slip of paper only serves one real purpose: to drive people to your website.
When you get a business card for someone you’re actually interested in getting to know (or better yet, for hiring), what’s the first thing you do? Pull up their website.
Your website is how potential clients and referral sources will size you up. They want to know that you’re professional and legit before they jump into bed with you, metaphorically speaking. They’re vetting you to see if you’re the best fit for their project, and you want to be sure you measure up to their expectations. Actually, you want to exceed their expectations, so they’re absolutely wowed, which is why you should use brand photography.
Bring in the right clients for your business
Your website will also help you to attract the right clients. We all have a target market and desperately want to avoid clients who are a bad fit for your style, personality, or offerings. Your website can do just that, and with brand photography, you can engage your ideal client. Let’s walk through an example:
You’re a personal trainer. You help women cultivate healthier lifestyles, but you want to narrow your audience down further and target a more niche segment. If you display images of women in their 40s exercising outdoors, you’ll attract a totally different client base than if you show images of women in their 20s holding various yoga poses. Whatever your niche, you can use your brand photography to show you working with your clients and achieving results.
Your personal brand should look and feel like you
In addition to being your calling card and helping you attract your ideal client, your website is a sneak peak at the person or team behind the business. For personal brands, this is essential to standing out from the growing competition. You want everything from your website’s messaging to its images to scream you and your personality. Because that’s what your clients are really paying you for. Yes, they want the results, but they chose you because of the unique way you provide them.
Using brand photography is honestly the only way to truly achieve this. Your personal brand is, well, personal. Stock photos or landscape images can portray a theme or an emotion, but they simply can’t express you at your core. Brand photography captures your authenticity and personality in a way that nothing else can. And given how much a prospect considers your personality in their decision to work with you, can you really afford not to show it off in every possible way?
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a website is a million
The stats vary, but at the end of the day, you really only have about 30 seconds to capture a website visitor’s attention before they typically head back to Google and click on your competitor’s website. So, obviously, you want to give your visitors as much information, without overloading them, as possible in those 30 seconds. Most people can read about 100 words (aka a short paragraph like this one) in that time. An image, as the saying goes, can convey about 1,000 words. Your website being the fusion of branded imagery and messaging will express a million words.
Your website is doing a lot of work for you. It’s communicating who you are, what you’re offering, who you work with, what it’s like to work with you, and the value your clients get from the process. Whew! That’s a lot. If visitors are getting all that information in just half a minute, and you’re showcasing your personality and aesthetic in brand photography, they’ll stay on your website longer, which is the entire point. The more time someone spends on your website, the more likely they are to engage with you on social media, comment on your blog posts, and contact you for more information. Those are all the baby steps people might take before buying from you.
Your website designer will love you
I did my research on this one. And by that I mean I asked my web designer to confirm, and she scientifically proved me right.
Designers absolutely love to build websites with brand photography. For starters, they have content to base their design decisions on and further develop the established branding in your professional photos. Also, it makes them look really awesome! When they have great content to work with, they can do great work! Bonus, you’ll love it too.
